No answer for a long time, so closing.
In general, this scanner should be supported by sane-backends-iscan. Note that version of this package in the bug log is 1.0.24, while version of sane itself is 1.0.24; maybe it made sense to update the package. In addition, iscan package was updated since the bug was filed, this could also solve the problem.
Finally note, that we don't provide some non-free parts of iscan in our packages. As Alexander said, users can try to download complete drivers from Epson site and try them.